Science: Missiles Away

(See Cover)

This is the nightmare of the missilemen: It is 1962, and the U.S. is lagging in its development of war’s newest weapon, the long-range guided missile. From Moscow to the apprehensive free world comes a terse radio announcement: for the next ten days, a 200-mile-square area in the landless South Pacific is a danger area; shipmasters and airplane pilots traverse it at their peril. The U.S. Navy and Air Force take tip surveillance of the area; radar tracking crews from Alaska to New Guinea stand by their gear. On one of these days, a small, swift object rises steeply from the Kamchatka Peninsula. It soars into space on a curve 500 miles high, curves downward even more swiftly toward the danger area. For a few seconds it glows like a meteor, trailing a bright streak of flame. Then out of the sea rises a dome of fire 20 miles across. The sea boils as if a volcano had poked through the crust of the earth, and a cloud of radioactive death drifts downwind. An earth wave jangles seismographs in San Francisco, St. Louis, New York, Madrid.

Again Moscow speaks: the heads of state of the leading free nations are invited to a new meeting at the summit. They accept. There is nothing else to do. Russia has the whip hand at last.

This climactic event in world politics is not possible now, and even at the impressive rate of missile development in the U.S.S.R., a 5,000-mile guided flight may not be possible in 1962. But the certainty that such a flight is possible—perhaps five years, not more than ten years from now—has made guided missiles the No. 1 crash program of the U.S. armed services. The urgency of development has conjured up technological triumphs that would have seemed unthinkable ten years ago. It has created a giant missile industry (one guess: $5 billion invested) that is breaking its bonds of secrecy in almost every corner of the U.S.

Birds of War. So far, official announcements about the missile program have been brief and vague. Glenn L. Martin Co. revealed recently, for instance, that it will build a $5,000,000 plant, undoubtedly for missiles, near Denver. Shortly after such bits of news are made public, a bolt of industrial lightning strikes the locality mentioned. A cornfield or patch of desert blossoms with bulldozers; roads and railroads unroll; a great, blank-looking building grows like a hard-shelled mushroom; odd and often monstrous machines arrive on flatcars and trailer-trucks. Houses are hammered together in new residential areas, and a new breed of men move into town. They speak a novel language, using words like “parameter,” “lox,” “apogee” and “servo.” They join in the life of the local community, but remain people apart, given to sudden silences.

These are the missile people, high technologists all. Some of them brood with pencil and paper; others contrive tiny instruments of inconceivable delicacy; others work with great rocket motors that shake the earth with their roars. All of them are racing that day when an enemy-made meteor glows like a spark in the sky. Long before that day, the U.S. must have its own deadly “birds” and many other monsters too.

Guided missiles powered by rocket motors are not new. Their military importance has been obvious since the German V-25, speeding many times as fast as the sound of their coming, hit London in 1944. If they had carried atomic warheads, they would have reduced much of England to radioactive rubble. No military nation missed this chilling lesson. War had taken on a new dimension; even before the first atomic bomb, it took little imagination to picture dozens of deadly duties that missiles could perform.

But for five years after World War II, the new and terrible birds of war that had been projected did not fly very well in actual fact. The captured V25 brought back from Germany proved hard to understand, let alone improve; yet they were far ahead of anything in the U.S.

Progress in carrying on from the V-2 was agonizingly slow. The missiles that took to the air were inaccurate, skittish.

The accurate, dependable, invulnerable, long-range missiles that had been so freely predicted did not appear. The late Senator Brien MacMahon, then chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, summed up the situation in his famous remark about pushbutton warfare. “All we have now,” said the Senator, “are the pushbuttons.”

Technological Revolution. Effective missiles call for a technology that did not then exist. The need was for better rocket motors, more sophisticated electronics, more intelligent computers, more sensitive instruments. The demand was for new metals, ceramics, fuels, new physics and mathematics. New production methods were called for—in short, a technological revolution.

This revolution has now happened. In the past ten years the world of electronics has evolved beyond recognition. Computers, the brains of the missiles, have grown in intelligence as fast as the magic unfolding of a child’s mind. Rocket motors are lighter, more dependable, enormously more powerful.

New factories have been built, such as the Hughes Aircraft plant that turns out the fierce, intelligent Falcons, the Air Force’s air-to-air missiles. The Falcon’s tiny gyros, bearings and electronic components must be manufactured with a super-watchmaker’s precision. The job is done in a great, windowless factory on the desert outside Tucson, Ariz. No speck of dust can be tolerated. The air is changed by fans and filters every nine minutes, and positive air pressure is maintained inside the building so that any air leakage will be outward, not inward. Engineers in the drafting rooms are forbidden to tear paper or use pencil erasers (both make dust), and all employees must wear nylon smocks. Among the best assembly workers are crippled men and women who are accustomed to sitting long hours without unnecessary motion.

Gestation Phase. Some of this improvement was due to the ever-rising curve of technological progress, but a good part was brought about by the missiles themselves. What they called for they generally got. Their problems were so exciting that top-grade physicists, mathematicians, chemists, even astronomers, were eager to tackle them. Many of the leaders of U.S. science have fashioned feathers and talons for the birds of war.

Key figure in the gestation phase of the missile industry was K. T. (for Kaufman Thuma) Keller, then president of Chrysler Corp., whom President Truman put in charge of the program in 1950. Production Man Keller had little patience with visionary plans; he wanted hardware, both in the factories and in the skies, and he got it. The missiles now in operational use—the Matador, Nike, Corporal, Terrier—are the result of Keller’s drive. Since most of them are soon to be replaced, Keller has been criticized for loading the inventory with so-so weapons. But this was inevitable in the rapid metabolism of modern war; Keller’s program created the knowledge, experience, test facilities and plants for the coming generations of missiles.*

When the early missiles were planned, it hardly seemed worthwhile to try for very long ranges. And so the most glamorous missile, the 5,000 mile ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile), got a low priority. An early contract with Convair was canceled, and work would have stopped entirely if Convair had not continued with its own money. Emphasis was put on defensive missiles—the ground-to-air Nike and the air-to-air Falcon—and on short-range offensive missiles for use near enemy lines.

The first thermonuclear tests in the Pacific in 1951 had only a distant bearing on missiles. The early hydrogen devices were not bombs. Later models became droppable bombs, but they were still much too heavy. Convair, nevertheless, was given a contract for a limited amount of work on an intercontinental missile—just in case.

In late 1953, Trevor Gardner, Assistant Air Secretary for Research and Development and onetime electronics manufacturer, was assigned to study the whole situation. He gathered a topflight military staff, and consulted civilian scientists of the highest caliber, one of whom was Mathematician John Von Neumann, now an Atomic Energy Commissioner.

Thermonuclear Breakthrough. Gardner’s survey, completed in early 1954, covered the missile front, but dominating its conclusions was a carefully reasoned forecast by the nuclear physicists. In a relatively few years, predicted Von Neumann and his associates after long sessions with their calculating machines, thermonuclear explosives would be light and handy enough to be carried by long-range missiles of reasonable size.

This was a breakthrough. It changed all the equations of scientific war, and it forced on the Department of Defense a grave decision: to concentrate intensively on the ICBM. No longer did the intercontinental ballistic missile need to hit a one-mile “pickle barrel” to be effective. A T-N (thermonuclear) warhead in the megaton range (equivalent to millions of tons of TNT) would blot out a large city even if it exploded well outside the city’s limits, and its radioactive fallout would have a killing effect a long way downwind. So the ICBM, besides being fairly small, might be fairly inaccurate and still do its job. For it, a C.E.P. (circular error of probability) of five miles would be good enough. And the cataclysmic effect of the great warhead made almost any cost of the missile well worth spending.

Once the decision was made, action was quick, drastic. The ICBM-got urgent priority in the Air Force. Since the ICBM is a “weapons system” which requires support from many technologies besides those of airframe building, the prime contract was taken away from Convair and given to Ramo-Wooldridge of Los Angeles, a young electronics firm staffed by scientists who had seceded from Hughes Aircraft Co.

Getting Things Done. In charge of the whole ICBM program is Major General Ben Schriever, head of the Air Force’s Western Development Division. Handsome, quick-moving General Schriever, 45, is a former airline pilot, a former Army Air Corps test pilot, and he holds a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. His job in the ICBM program is like that of Lieut. General Leslie R. Groves, who bossed the development of the atomic bomb. Trevor Gardner calls him “vice president in charge of getting things done.”

The far-reaching effect of the thermonuclear breakthrough did not stop with the ICBM. It was only reasonable to suppose that the Russians must be working on their own ICBM. Therefore, an anti-ICBM missile, though extraordinarily difficult, should at least be attempted. And since the Russians might deliver light T-N bombs by high-performance airplanes, the antiaircraft missiles, both ground-to-air and air-to-air, got new urgency.

So did missiles of intermediate range (up to 1,500 miles). The same prospective weight reduction of the T-N warhead that made the ICBM practical upgraded the medium-range missiles to weapons of enormous military value. The conclusions of Von Neumann and his nuclear associates affected the entire military posture of the U.S.

The fact that missiles are now No. 1 was reflected in Defense Secretary Charles Wilson’s recent demand for $1 billion for the missile program. This sum is sure to increase as production gets under way, and it is sure to be supplemented by large items (for missile ships, ground carriers, training, etc.) tucked away elsewhere in the military budget. Another reflection was the appointment in August 1955 of Donald Aubrey Quarles as Secretary of the Air Force. Significantly, Quarles is a physicist and an electronics man. He worked most of his life at Western Electric Co. and Bell Telephone Laboratories, and became president of Sandia Corp., which designs and manufactures nuclear weapons.

The ICBM, which must range more than 5,000 miles to be worthy of its name, is guided only during a short initial part of its flight. During most of its high-soaring course, it follows an unguided ballistic trajectory, like an artillery shell. Today the ICBM has passed through the study stage and is well in the stage of research and development. Hardware is beginning to appear, and many well-proved components, notably rocket motors, are being adapted to work with each other. General Schriever believes that no further inventions are needed—only a great deal of high-level and costly engineering. He is prepared for spectacular failures, but is sure of ultimate success.

Propulsion Problem. As now planned, the body of the ICBM will have two alternative “configurations” (shape and arrangement of rockets), one to be built by Convair, the other by Martin. The propulsion problem is considered fairly well in hand, and the industrial hero of rocket propulsion is North American Aviation, Inc. Back in the early postwar years, North American got a contract to develop a long-range, air-breathing, (i.e., winged) missile. The best chance seemed to be for a high-performance plane propelled by a ramjet engine at very high altitude and at two or three times the speed of sound. Since ram-jets have no thrust at all when standing still and not much thrust below the speed of sound, a rocket booster was necessary to get the winged missile (now called the Navaho) up to cruising speed. North American found that HO one was interested in developing rocket motors big enough for the Navaho’s booster, so it did the job itself, starting almost from scratch and building its own test facilities in the Santa Susana mountains, 40 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

Santa Susana is a fabulous place, a three-sq.-mi. area fenced and guarded, and crowded with up-and-down ridges dotted with rounded red rocks. A steep road winds over a pass and plunges into an amazing array of futuristic structures. There is no natural level land. Big buildings, fat tanks and weird testing equipment perch on crags or nestle in rocky crannies. New construction is being pushed with frantic urgency. The whole place swarms with hard-hatted workers. Bulldozers climb like mountain goats, pushing parts of the mountains ahead of them. A plant is in construction that will take from the air 600 tons of liquid oxygen per day.

Tucked away in ravines, to reflect sound upward, are the massive steel structures where rocket motors are put through their paces. Their beams are as strong as the piers of suspension bridges, and they are “fishhooked” into the rock to keep them from being lifted by the thrust of the rockets. Seven hundred feet away are squat blockhouses with periscope windows. When a powerful motor is under test, an enormous flame licks down the precipice, sometimes bounding upward in a billow of yellow fire. A sound like the rumble of doomsday rolls among the rocks, making the flesh quiver like shaken jelly.

The rocket motors responsible for all this commotion are dainty, five-foot things, some of which have the silhouette of a slim-waisted girl in a dancing dress. Around their bodices (combustion chambers) and flaring skirts (tail cones) are parallel metal strengthening bands that look like decorative ruffles. When stored in the open, they often wear translucent fichus of plastic film. A strong man can put one of them in the trunk of a car, but these frail dancing girls of space could lift 40 cars; when they are flying at full speed, they develop millions of horsepower, more than the top energy production of Hoover Dam.

Guidance Problem. For advanced missiles, guidance is a more serious problem than propulsion. Two guiding systems are of obvious value for an ICBM, and both are being developed. One, under contracts with American Bosch Arma, AC Spark Plug and M.I.T., is “inertial guidance.” Its heart is a subtle instrument that senses every force that acts on the flying missile, the enormous force of the rocket thrust and the delicate forces of crosswinds and yawing motions. This information goes to a computer (contracts with Burroughs and Sperry Rand) that figures out the missile’s position, speed and direction. If any one of these is not right for the programmed trajectory, the computer makes corrections, moving the missile’s fins or regulating its fuel to put it back on its proper course.

The alternative system (“radio inertial”) uses a similar instrument in the missile, but readings that show the missile’s behavior are sent back to the launching site by radio waves. Then a computer on the ground tells the missile, also by radio, what to do. Each system has its advantages. Radio inertial guidance, for instance, keeps the computer on the ground, where it can be as big and heavy as necessary. Pure inertial guidance, on the other hand, is self-contained and unaffected by radio interference or enemy jamming.

Both systems must exert their influence while the missile is still in the atmosphere or the motor is still thrusting. In space, with the rocket cold, a ballistic missile is as independent as an asteroid. But another guidance problem remains. The missile ascends toward space nose up and cruises toward its target around the curve of the earth. Thus, in natural flight it will re-enter the atmosphere more or less broadside on. This is undesirable; so a “positioning device” must be provided to turn its nose toward its target. There are several possible ways of doing this, such as gyroscopes, flywheels and gas-jets.

Re-Entry Crisis. Somewhere during the passage through space, which will last only 30 minutes over a 5,000-mile range, the bulk of the missile separates from the “reentry body,” i.e., the nose cone and warhead. Now comes the crisis of the missile’s life. As it drops down into the fringe of the atmosphere 60 to 80 miles up, it is moving at about 16,000 m.p.h. At this enormous speed, even the thin upper air generates temperatures that will vaporize any known substance. The dense lower air is even worse, and it smacks the re-entry body with jarring deceleration forces 20 times gravity. The situation is complicated by the fact that the air sweeping past the missile is ionized by high heat. This absorbs some energy, but creates corrosive particles. It is also responsible for the meteor-like trail.

The designers of the ICBM believe that re-entry is their worst problem. The missile must not burn up, as most natural meteors do, and it must not lose its shape. Its thermonuclear warhead must not be exploded prematurely, and it must not be so damaged that it will not explode at all.

The ICBM-men are confident that these problems can be licked, but they do not say just how. One possibility is to make the missile slow down as much as possible when it is in the thin upper air, where the heating effect is still moderate. When it hits thick air, it will therefore be moving more slowly and have a better chance of getting through to the target. Another method, probably the most important one, is to keep heat from penetrating more than the skin of the missile. A third possibility, exploding the warhead while many miles above the surface, is not acceptable to the ICBM-men. The great thermonuclear charge might still have a blast-and-heat effect on the ground far below, but it would not produce other effects—chiefly radioactive fallout.

Equations of War. The ICBM is the nearest thing to an “ultimate weapon,” complete with delivery system, that has ever been conceived. From U.S.-controlled territory, it could reach any part of the world, wreck the biggest city by blast and heat. Then the radioactive byproducts, drifting with the wind, could turn an area the size of many nations into a silent wilderness. An enemy’s version of ICBM could do the same to any part of the U.S.

The ICBM will be comparatively cheap. After the enormous development costs are paid, each missile will cost, not counting the warhead, about $1,000,000. (A B-52 bomber costs $8,000,000.) It will need few spare parts. It will not have to be flown to keep the crew in practice, thus eliminating “attrition” (crackups). Its launching site will be very cheap compared with the cost of a modern bomber base. Missiles can be dispersed widely, a few or one to each launching site. They can be hidden to a considerable extent, they are potentially mobile, they can be put underground. For the cost of a few B-52 bases, the U.S. can have several hundred sites, and the enemy would have to knock all of them out to be safe from retaliation.

Eye on the Ball. Will the ICBMs work, and when will they be ready? Most missile experts seem to believe that the task of developing them is not impossible, but that the timetable is uncertain. It may be five or even ten years, say the pessimists. Meanwhile, the U.S. must keep itself able to ward off more conventional attacks on its territory, and also be able to retaliate if an attack comes. Even high Air Force officers who have most faith in the ICBM feel that the U.S. must push conventional programs, both offensive and defensive, almost as if the ICBM were impossible.

General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command, is emphatic on this point. He is not against missiles, though sometimes quoted as being so, but he feels that in air warfare it is always necessary to keep one’s eye on the ball, not on the distant future. “We must put more time and money,” he says, “into the development of these birds. Missiles are another step in the evolution of war. We will use them as we get them, and we will get them when they are effective and reliable.” LeMay’s mission is to be ready for instant, effective action. He wants a continuous supply of weapons that will make such action possible, including lesser missiles than the ICBM.

Besides such considerations, there is the real possibility that the ICBM is “the weapon least likely to be used.” All parties in a war may decide to keep their birds in their nests, fearing with good reason the devastating effect of thermonuclear attack and retaliation against population centers. Such forbearance would be a missile-armed extension of the U.S. policy of deterrence now based on LeMay’s bombers.

Atomic Defense. So far in warfare, every new weapon has brought forth a counter-weapon. Missilemen suspect—they even hope—that this will happen again. Their best hope is in atom-armed birds, whose fireballs may be more de-tructive in space than in the atmosphere. Some believe that they can even destroy an ICBM striking at 16,000 m.p.h. Such missiles can be tracked by their heat and ionized trails, and their trajectories determined. The “reaction time” will be frighteningly short—only a few minutes.

The missilemen are not happy, however. Both civilian and military, they know too well the potential effect on the earth of thermonuclear warfare. They fear that some small, irresponsible nation may get hold of a missile or two and blot out the capital city of a nation that it hates. Or perhaps when the great nations are armed to the teeth with long-range missiles and nervously watching each other, some quick mistake will be made. An innocent meteor may be mistaken for an invading missile. There will be no time to check or debate, and the decision to fire “in retaliation” will be made by some low-ranking officer. Retaliation may result in counterretaliation, and in a few more minutes all the world’s missiles may fly.

But missilemen also have a hope that supports them: the ultimate weapon may produce the ultimate stalemate, a world in which all factions are afraid to start a war, and will take measures to keep it from starting accidentally.

*Air Force people call missiles “birds” or “vehicles” (pronounced vehicles). Army people usually call them “rounds,” probably an unconscious attempt to emphasize their contention that missiles are artillery,’ not airplanes.

*First called the Atlas, from Floyd Odium’s Atlas Corp., which then owned Convair. The name was changed later to IBM, then to ICBM, to avoid confusion with International Business Machines Corp.